The Institute of Medicine’s 2011 report, Patient Safety and Health IT: Building Safer Systems for Better Care, expressed dismay that patient safety hadn’t improved very much since its landmark 1999 study, To Err is Human. But, many say rushing to implement systems that haven’t been thoroughly tested for safety, just to meet Meaningful Use timelines, is a big part of the problem.

“Organizations can only assume so much change so fast and do it in a safe and effective manner,” Russell Branzell, CEO of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, told me when I asked him about the focus on patient safety and health IT. 

Aside from the national agencies charged with ensuring patient safety in healthcare facilities, more and more organizations are focusing on patient safety as it relates to health IT. EHRs and other IT tools offer a host of benefits including efficiency and coordination, but these tools also can actually create patient safety problems. See the article for more on this topic.

Population health is another topic with a big influence on providers these days. Institutes and collaborations are popping up across the country, including the Center for Population Health IT at Johns Hopkins University. The university launched the center to meet the demand for technologies that support value-based payment models. The center focuses on the application of EHRs, mobile health and health IT tools targeted at communities and populations.

One CPHIT project is a partnership with CRISP (Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients), Maryland’s state health information exchange (HIE), to develop real-time predictive modeling to identify patients at high risk of readmission. Learn more about this and other population health initiatives in Laura Pedulli’s article.

Also in this issue is a look at several Beacon communities—the three-year grant projects that helped 17 communities across the country accelerate their existing health IT, interoperability and care coordination efforts.

These communities used notification systems, patient engagement strategies, data analytics and more to spur impressive results. Read about improvements and lessons learned here. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has an ambitious plan for sharing best practices from the Beacons so it seems the communities’ efforts will aid other locales for many years to come.

You’ll also find articles on programs targeting chronic disease management, how RFID is improving efficiency by tracking people and equipment and image sharing.

Thanks for reading. Writing from New England where spring is struggling to emerge as of presstime, I hope you’re experiencing sunny skies and comfortable temperatures.